Latest from Colleen Taylor

President Obama announced this morning that Jason Goldman, a longtime tech industry executive best known for his work alongside Ev Williams during the formative years of products such as Blogger, Twitter, and Medium, has been named the White House’s first-ever “Chief Digital Officer.” The news was first reported by Politico.
Goldman will be overseeing the White… Read More

Twitch, the immensely popular livestreaming service for gamers that was acquired last year by Amazon in a nearly $1 billion deal, confirmed today that it has suffered a security breach that may have resulted in unauthorized access to a number of user accounts. The company is now forcing all of its users to change their passwords.
Twitch alerted users to the breach in a blog post on its… Read More

Yesterday afternoon, the legal team representing venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers rested its case in the Ellen Pao Vs. Kleiner Perkins trial, bringing the fourth full week in the courtroom to a close. The end of the trial is now clearly in sight, with only the closing arguments and the jury deliberations remaining.
Over the past several days, Kleiner’s head… Read More

A former Facebook employee is suing the social networking giant for alleged sex discrimination and harassment, discrimination and harassment based on race or national origin, and wrongful discharge from the company, among other charges.
In a lawsuit filed this week in San Mateo, plaintiff Chia Hong said that she started working at Facebook in June 2010, when she was hired as a program manager. Read More

Y Combinator, the startup accelerator known for being the birthplace of Dropbox, Reddit, Airbnb, Stripe, and a number of other companies, released some updated stats this morning showing just how big it’s gotten — and how diverse its current class of companies is.
Y Combinator says it has now funded 842 companies to date, and those startups have raised upwards of $3 billion in… Read More

Shift Labs is a small startup launching this spring out of Y Combinator with a lofty tagline: to be “the Nest of medical devices.” But as ambitious as that goal may sound at first, when you take a closer look at Shift Labs, it doesn’t sound that crazy after all. In fact, it seems almost inevitable.
If you’ve spent any time in a hospital, you’ve likely noticed that… Read More

Obvious Ventures, the venture capital firm started by Twitter and Medium co-founder Ev Williams, has raised a total of $77.7 million for its inaugural fund, Obvious Ventures I, according to a regulatory document filed today.
Obvious Ventures, which counts longtime tech entrepreneur James Joaquin and executive-turned-investor Vishal Vasishth as co-founders, was unveiled in December 2014 with… Read More

When Kleiner Perkins’ head legal counsel Lynne Hermle pulled up a seating chart from the firm’s December 2011 offsite on the court’s projector during her cross examination of Ellen Pao yesterday, the courtroom remained respectfully silent.
But there was a collective groan in the online backchannel of reporters who have been covering the Pao Vs. Kleiner Perkins trial in… Read More

Harold Kahn, the San Francisco Superior Court judge who is overseeing the ongoing Ellen Pao Vs. Kleiner Perkins trial, has ruled that Kleiner Perkins’ legal team will not be able to discuss the personal financial situation of Pao and her husband in front of the jury.
It’s a blow for Kleiner Perkins, which is being sued for at least $16 million, an amount that represents the… Read More

Kleiner Perkins’ legendary venture investor John Doerr testified last week that Ellen Pao needed to “own the room” if she wanted to move up in the world of venture capital.
Today, she did just that.
Until her turn on the witness stand today, we hadn’t heard directly from Pao in the several years of run-up to the courtroom trial of Ellen Pao vs. Kleiner Perkins… Read More

While we’d argue that every episode of CrunchWeek is special, today is an extra special show, because it’s the last one we’re having at the big white table. That’s right: Our little studio is finally getting an upgrade! For the next few weeks, TechCrunch’s video studio will be under construction for a fresh new look. We’ll continue to make CrunchWeek as… Read More

Venture capital firm Formation 8 has been removed as a defendant in a lawsuit filed in January against tech entrepreneur and investor Joe Lonsdale from a former girlfriend alleging sexual assault, battery, and other charges.
Lonsdale, who co-founded security and defense technology firm Palantir, is also a co-founder of Formation 8. He has vigorously denied all of Clougherty’s claims, and… Read More

Nextdoor just became the latest private tech company to join the swelling ranks of the billion-dollar valuation club.
The San Francisco startup, which runs a social network for people to interact with others who live in their physical neighborhoods, announced today it has raised $110 million in new funding. Nextdoor has confirmed that the raise was conducted at a $1.11 billion post-money… Read More

“Didn’t you tell Ms. Pao at the time that one of the reasons you chose Randy Komisar to be a board partner was that Randy ‘needed a win’?” asked Alan Exelrod, the lead counsel for the plaintiff in the case of Ellen Pao V. Kleiner Perkins. Read More

42Floors, the startup that’s built a platform for finding and leasing commercial office space, has laid off around half of its staff as part of a plan to refocus on its core search business, TechCrunch has learned.
A total of 14 people across 42Floors’ San Francisco and New York offices were let go today, we’re told. That’s around half of 42Floors’ workforce. The… Read More

Social+Capital Partnership, the investment firm founded by former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya, is raising $450 million for its third fund, dubbed “Social Capital Partnership III, L.P.,” according to regulatory documents filed today.
The new fund represents a significant boost in size from Social+Capital’s second fund, which targeted a $325 million raise beginning… Read More

Uber announced today that its database was breached by an unauthorized third party last year. The company confirmed the breach in a company blog post published this afternoon, authored by Uber’s managing counsel of data private Katherine Tassi.
The breach, which occurred on May 13 2014, revealed the names and license plate numbers of approximately 50,000 drivers across various states. Read More

The world of venture capital has long been cloaked in understated reticence and secrecy. That’s especially been true for the traditional top tier Sand Hill Road firms, such as Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers. After all, a big benefit of being in the private market is, well, the privacy. Deals can be done with handshakes. Salaries and bonuses can be confidential. Business strategies… Read More

It was nearly three years ago that TechCrunch broke the story that Ellen Pao, then a partner at vaunted Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, was suing the firm for alleged gender discrimination and professional retaliation she said she experienced after reporting a colleague for sexual harassment. Subsequently, Kleiner responded that Pao’s case has… Read More

Nearly six months after scoring an attention-grabbing funding round of $100 million, service marketplace Thumbtack has attracted two new big name executives to help oversee its ambitious growth plans for the months ahead.
Thumbtack is announcing today it’s brought on former Google executive Mark Schaaf to serve as its first VP of engineering, and former Apple design director Vander… Read More